Help with skimmer suction

[twoandadog]

Hello, and a gigantic THANK YOU to all you experts, your advice and articles have been extremely helpful to us. I am hoping you can rescue us again. Our pool is one month old. Yesterday we had our new waterfall installed, beautiful, but it left our water so dirty and full of sand and debris. This morning we are trying to use our hose vacuum to clean it, but it isn’t going well. We already removed, cleaned and replaced the cartridge filter, and the pump basket. We removed the skimmer basket attached the hose to the skimmer, set the pump to “quick clean” and initially had some suction. However, we quickly began losing suction and the suction in the skimmer is just intermittent. We removed the pump basket again and it did have some rocks in it, but now it is clean and we are still not getting a constant suction. Also, the pump is occasionally making a “grinding” sound, and when we open the relief valve on the filter housing, there is air mixed in. Our pool builder is closed today, and we are really wanting to get our water TFP Clear again! Thank you!

 

[Texas Splash]

Stick with it. It may take a couple days for the dust to settle from all the previous work. If you are manually vacuuming (like I still do), the cart filter may get overwhelmed fairly quickly, but that should taper-off as well. I suspect you are making sure the vacuum hose is thoroughly primed before you attached it to the skimmer correct? I like to take the vacuum head end and place it against a return jet to fill it full of water, then attach it to the vacuum head (submerged). Then I attach the skimmer end of the hose into the skimmer hole. Make sure all the suction is pulling from that skimmer only. I don't use a skimmer vacuum plate. I just remove the skimmer basket and slip the vacuum cuff end directly into the skimmer hole (port).

When I vacuum, the pump pot never stays full and you will probably see more air in the system than usual. That should be fine. You may need to vacuum 2 or 3 days to allow dust to settle.

 

[twoandadog]

Thank you! We will try all of this. I appreciate your help!